My signature is simply prints the number of the post as per the count of number of write-ups on my home node (and as such my signature can be seen to change between posts). Whilst I could have implemented this simply with something like perl -le 'print 636', I decided to make it a little more interesting.

The pack function takes a list of values and converts these to the internal machine-level representation of the values as per the first argument to this function known as the "template". In my signature, this is used to convert a string with a 32-bit binary number into a machine-level representation of this value. The reverse of this is performed with the unpack function which converts from an internal machine-level representation to a string based again upon the template argument to the function. In the case of my signature, this outputs a big-endian order unsigned long integer representing the post number.

 

perl -le 'print+unpack"N",pack"B32","00000000000000000000001001111100"'

In reply to Re: Re: Return values from package methods by rob_au
in thread Return values from package methods by rob_au

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